I will miss him. May he rest in peace and may not tick too badly Guy in Upstairs when Felger starts tinkering his famous projects in there. Dead but not Forgotten. Felger still is part of this community now and in the future with his legancy living in here.

_________________If seeing is believing, how can blind person believe in anything?Maturity is just not experience in life but also ability to make compromises.

Really sad....he and I communicated frequently via PMs. Never met him other than through SPCR, but I considered him a friend. R.I.P. FC.

_________________"At the core of liberalism is the spoiled child - miserable, as all spoiled children are, unsatisfied, demanding, ill disciplined, despotic, and useless. Liberalism is the philosophy of sniveling brats." - P.J. O'Rourke

:cry: I am really sorry to hear this. My sincere condolances to his friends and family. May he rest in peace.

Same here.

Funny how the internet can bring people of such different backgrounds together when just a few years ago most of us would have never known he existed. I can't claim to know him anymore than his SPCR online persona would allow, but as far as I could tell he was a curious, thoughtful, intelligent, and kind person.

Definitely a loss here, and I'm sure a million times over to his family and friends.

Thanks for this Neil. It's been weighing on my mind. I wanted to post my own thread, but thought it would be better coming from the mods.

Though like most of us, I didn't know Felger Carbon in life, but I'm sure we all felt a kinship with someone like him. F/C was always lurking around here, helping out the newbs when he could and providing insight with his frankenstein airflow experiments. I kind of looked to him as a big-brother figure 'round here, and was always waiting for his next post on the "new and improved" version of some wacky experiment that would end up shining empirical proof over some hotly contested debate.

Farewell, Brother. May you rest in peace and may you find the silence you sought.

I first met in-person the man you all knew as "Felger Carbon" in about 1983. By then he had become my friend through correspondence and phone calls (Remember, Al hadn't yet invented the Internet) that began at least 2 years earlier when I became a customer of Digital Acoustics, his company in Santa Ana, CA.

He used his real name then, Hal W. Hardenbergh. He adopted the nom de plume Felger Carbon about 15 years ago when he finally dropped the name "Former FNE", referring to his original editorial persona Felgercarb N. Eloi, usually abbreviated as FNE. Under that name he wrote and published the DTACK Grounded newsletter (see, http://linux.monroeccc.edu/~paulrsm/dg/dg01.htm) through most of the 1980s while he also ran Digital Acoustics.

D.A. had been formed (using proceeds of a previous very successful business) to make microprocessor-based acoustic-measurement instruments for a market of noise-pollution control that failed to materialize. So...Hal went into the business of making other sorts of computer-based gadgets, including the one that made me his customer: an add-on board for the Commodore PET or Apple II that supercharged them with a Motorola MC68000 processor with its data-throttling pin (DTACK) firmly grounded--a pedal-to-the-metal hot rod in its day. These products proved to have a limited market, despite working fabulously well and being comparatively very inexpensive.

When "Kindly Uncle Jack" (In his very entertaining D.G. stories FNE always called Commodore founder Jack Tramiel that or "KUJ") brought out the Atari ST, the first freestanding MC68000 hot rod, Hal decided that he'd become the next Bill Gates by offering a compiled BASIC for the machine, to be called "DBASIC". His business model would be to give away the compiler, but sell the manual. He almost single-handedly wrote the compiler (I think that James Shaker helped a bit) and I helped him write some of the manual. Hal folded up the D.A. tent and moved to Santa Fe, NM to open DTACK Grounded, Inc and sell DBASIC manuals.

It took less than about 6 months to very firmly establish that this business model was not going to work for the Atari ST market. Hal carted all the unsold copies of the manual to the dump, declared himself an "unemployed bum", and moved to Santa Clara, CA where there were far more engineering jobs than in Santa Fe at the time (ca. 1988).

In Santa Clara, Hal worked for a couple of video-processor specialty companies for a few years, while continuing to send irregular issues of an abbreviated newsletter that he called "Dear Folks", which dealt with various industry trends, such as the evolution of memory sizes and costs and the hard disk drive cost-size "sweet spot". Then he decided that it was time to retire and just play with computer toys for his own (and his friends') amusement.

He then played with computer toys and wrote entertainingly about it for about 10 years, stopping only long enough to relocate to Klamath Falls when his Santa Clara lease expired and he realized that he had no further need to live in crowded Silicon Valley. About that time he also discovered SPCR and got back to his old passion, acoustics and noise. But it seems that sometime recently his deteriorating health finally overcame his strongly optimistic outlook and he decided to do something else, something at least as dramatic and decisive as his previous career changes had been. He bought a gun.

We've carried on a nearly daily email correspondence ever since Hal got an ISP account. These replaced our phone calls and letters of long ago and I've gotten used to not hearing Hal's voice very often. But it's going to be difficult to stop looking for those notes in my inbox.

Last edited by TPeterson on Wed Jul 02, 2008 7:33 am, edited 1 time in total.

I met Hal back in about 1974; I was 14 at the time. My father and I were visiting his facility, Digital Acoustics. He showed me a game that was running on a Wang 2200 computer. It was a simulated football game, all ascii text based. It even had <STREAKER> scroll horizontally across the screen occasionally. From that moment on... Hal changed my life forever. I was hooked on computers and electronics in general.

I eventually went to work for Hal when I turned 20. He taught me the real life engineering facts that universities fail to teach. He always demonstrated to me through his actions that if you believe in something, you put your time into it. He was a great man to work for and with. I could not and would not have picked any better mentor. During that time he treated me as a son; not only giving me guidance in my engineering but my personal life as well.

A few years ago when the 220mm fans were coming out, you could only get one with a case. Apparently F.C. bought a bunch of these setups. One day I got a PM from him, offering to give me one of these new fans to see what I could do with it. I accepted the offer....a few days later I got a box with two fans, which I proceeded to incorporate into a new setup.

I doubt anyone else on these forums would be so generous....I miss you F.C.

_________________"At the core of liberalism is the spoiled child - miserable, as all spoiled children are, unsatisfied, demanding, ill disciplined, despotic, and useless. Liberalism is the philosophy of sniveling brats." - P.J. O'Rourke

I am shocked and very sad to read this.
Like many in these forums I didn't know him personally but I knew him as an active, informed, friendly and kind member. When quickly reading through very long threads his posts were always the must reads. I think everyone who knew him, personally or otherwise, will miss him.
My condolences to his family and friends.

He earned my respect. I can't say the slightest negative thing about him. He will be missed.

_________________.Please put a country in your profile if you haven't already.This site is international but I'll assume you are in the US if you don't tell me otherwise.RAID levels thread http://www.silentpcreview.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=388987

I am greatly saddened by this, especially since I moved down to Klamath Falls not too long ago and missed the opportunity to get to know him. I looked for an obituary in the local paper but it seems to have not included him. I didn't even know he was in poor health.

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